Ed Kost on Dead Men Walking: Feminization of Christianity, Authentic Aussies, & the Redeemed Podcast

Exploring theology, doctrine, and all of the fascinating subjects in between. Broadcasting from an undisclosed location. Dead Men Walking starts now. Well, hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Dead Men Walking podcast.

Thanks for coming along, telling a friend, checking us out at dmwpodcast .com. You can find out a little more about the podcast. You can support the show in the merch cave. We have all kinds of fun t-shirts and mugs and sweatshirts and snarky tees.

Go check it out. We appreciate it. Man, what a great week I had. I don't know when this will be dropping, but I just got back from the Fight Left Feast conference. I'm sure you guys have been hearing some of those episodes that we did, and it was awesome.

Got right back from Tennessee up into Michigan, and now we're back at it, we have a special guest here today. It is Mr. Ed Kost. He's the creator and producer of the Redeem podcast. A very unique podcast, I would say.

Not very many of them out there. A lot of podcasts out there, and this one is unique. Mr. Ed Kost, why don't you tell us about this podcast and introduce yourself to our guests. How are you doing, brother?

Hi, everyone. Thanks for having.

Me. I'm from Australia, down under. I am, like Greg said, the host of Redeem podcast. I create dramatized stories inspired by biblical events. The intention is to spread the messages of Christ through immersive drama.

It's aimed particularly at adults because adults love dramatized podcasts too, not just children. I'm really passionate about high quality Christian entertainment that.

Isn't cringy and actually enjoyable. Before we get into it, I want to play a little clip just to give the listeners an idea of what they'll be listening to when they tune into the Redeem.

Podcast. Check it out. They stopped at the heavy olive wood doors of the king's chamber. That better be you, Claudius. Good luck. Shut up. Claudius took a deep breath and pushed the heavy door open. He turned and glared at the guard as he shut the door.

I love it. We got the sound.

Effects, the accents, the different characters. Very cool, man. Thanks a lot. One of the soldiers.

Actually sounds like Russell Crowe, my favorite character. Yeah, I was very lucky when I found him.

Hey, let's get him saved and get him on your podcast. Absolutely. Very cool. So tell me a few minutes. Tell me a little bit about where this idea came from. You said you like quality podcasts. It's aimed towards adults.

I don't hear a whole lot of podcasts out there like that, that are exploring the Bible through professional audio sound effects and things like that. So where'd.

The idea even come from? I was inspired originally by listening to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a teenager. And when I listened to that, it felt like I was dreaming while awake. And I've always kind of liked to play around with sound effects.

And I made little, like everyone did in the 90s, fake radio shows with my sisters. So the passion was always there. And then I'm also particularly passionate about good theology. So I kind of like compressed everything together and created this with the intention of maintaining that respect of good theology.

So I'm never going to add to the words of Jesus. Jesus says whatever.

He says in the Bible, and that'll be reflected in the podcast. Yeah, awesome. So how long does it take you to produce and execute an episode like that? Well, the full length ones, which are.

About 40 minutes, took me about three to four months to create. But the last one I made, which is a 10 minute mini episode, I did that in two weeks, because I got married between that episode and the episode before that.

And my wife is brilliant to bounce ideas off. Yeah, congrats. Thank you. So hopefully, subsequent episodes will be made a lot faster with her help.

Yeah, I've got to realize, are you using a production team? Is it just you, or you and a few people? Or what are you doing over there?

So it's just me. Besides the actors that I hire, I'm writing it, and I'm recording and producing it. And I actually want to vlog the process from end to end, because it's quite fascinating how I choose the sound effects.

Like in episode two, there's this scene where you hear a rope in tension, because there's a birdcage swinging in the wind. And that sound effect actually wasn't available. Like if you look through sound libraries, you can't really search bird, rope in tension.

You got to be creative. So that sound effect is actually the sound of a leather jacket being twisted. Nice. Because it takes so much time to find the perfect sound effects and also to cut and paste and rearrange the music, it does take time.

But it's so enjoyable.

Yeah. The first, when I listened to it, I just went, oh my gosh, as someone who's running his own podcast for two years, and I do all my own edits and sound and audio, and I'm very on the beginner side of it.

Okay. I'm no, by no means an expert. I just went, the very first thing I thought of was not, oh, this is beautiful quality, or I love the story. I just went, this has got to be, takes so long to produce and write and edit and find those effects.

Seriously. I was thinking about the technical side of it and it's done so beautifully. It really is. I mean, for listeners, you guys need to go check out redeem podcast because it is, it's something where you listen to it.

It kind of takes you away. And I think anyone in our ilk, especially in the reform crowd who have listened to any type of audio book or, or, or even read a book. And you have that in your imagination, like Narnia and Lord of the Rings and all those types.

This is a beautiful representation of the Bible in an audio format and it's free too. So I appreciate all the work and passion you put into it. Thanks so much. Thank you. Now here's the thing. We're listening to redeem podcast and we've, we've got the Bible and, and Bible stories and things like that.

But outside of that, on your social media and through other things you do, I mean, you're out there talking about subjects that might be a lightning rod that a lot of Christians kind of avoid. And I really appreciate that because that's what we do here.

We do want to bring glory to God and everything we do. Sometimes that means talking about things that aren't popular within the church. And what I've seen is we talk a lot about the Western Christian church over here, or even the American church as being in the United States, but your brother, that's in Australia, or you're from Australia.

Are you still there right now? I'm still there. Yes. Okay. So you're from Australia, live in Australia, you're halfway around the world. And we were talking offline and we've kind of seen some of the same themes throughout evangelical or Protestantism in the church.

And this is universal. And one of those things that I want to touch on today, we went from a very nice intro of your podcast. Now we're going to get into something a little, you know, a little, a little deeper and maybe, like I said, a little more controversial but the feminization of the church and of the man of the Christian man and of the church.

I know that you've done some work on and you spoke out about it. Give us a little overview of what you see over there and even over here. And I'll concur over here since I'm here and you're there. But what have we seen in the last 10, 20, 30 years within the church and really ramped up in the last three to five years.

The Feminization of the Church and Its Effects

Of the feminization of church? I think a lot of men have for a long time at church felt that something was wrong but we couldn't really put it into words. We thought that maybe something was wrong with ourselves.

But many things that I've noticed and a lot of men maybe have noticed and hopefully by listening to this they'll start to kind of resonate and vocalize these frustrations because they need to come out.

We need to address them. The first is the very feminine, touchy songs we sing. As a man, when I'm happy, I don't usually sing songs. That's not what I do. My wife does that. She sings songs and she dances.

Even the act of singing songs in a public setting is awkward generally for a man. But that's not really the point. The point is the actual songs that we sing. They're very feminine, very touchy, feeling all about tenderness and love.

As a result,.

They're not really theologically correct. Here on the podcast, really quick to interrupt, we call those Jesus is my boyfriend songs. You can't tell if it's a pop love song or if it's a worship song, especially in contemporary Christian music.

A lot of it has to do with a large movement of Hillsong, which actually originated in Australia. Yeah, go on.

There's actually, I want to show you a particular song that I hate probably the most. It's called Run to the Father. I just want to read out the short chorus. When I read it, it sounds like I'm reading a page from a woman's journal.

It goes like this. I run to the father. I fall into grace. I'm done with the hiding. No reason to wait. My heart needs a surgeon. My soul needs a friend. I run to the father again and again and again.

Yeah, very popular song. Now, the worst part of this song is that connected to the chorus is the singing of the melody. You got men singing this song and then singing the melody. It's so embarrassing to do that.

We don't sing like that. This is so outside of our nature. Anyway, besides the Sappy Jesus boyfriend songs, there's the sermons that seem to be very, very fragile. It just feels like the pastors are afraid to offend.

Because church is catered to women. It's catered towards people that are more emotionally fragile. The sermons are all about just the tenderness of God and his love and don't really reflect the complete nature of God.

His wrath and certainly don't address political issues like abortion. Or if they do, it's 10 minutes of.

Apologizing first and then saying something that's a soft landing, not taking a hard stance on it,.

For sure. There was a guy actually in the news, I don't know if he reached America, but Guy Mason was interviewed by a popular Australian host that was interviewed about abortion. And he was apologizing during an interview saying that likening abortion to the Holocaust was a poor choice of words, we should have used more gentler words.

No, like murder is murder, like when you're talking about the Holocaust. Anyway, that's an example of a reflection of how the church responds to it.

So over here, Ligonier Ministries, which was started by R .C. Sproul, they do national polls every year, and they'll take anywhere from five to 10 ,000 believers. And they even have polls on what a believer is.

But they did a poll a few years ago and realized that the majority of churchgoers in the American home are women. Therefore, pastors and churches and organizations, they kind of tend to, like you said, kind of wrap their message around getting more women into church because they've realized, well, if we can get the woman in, then maybe she can bring in the kids and the husband.

Now, as a complementarian, OK, full disclosure, everyone knows that on this podcast, I think men and women were created for specific roles, equal in value, different in role. I find that abhorrent the fact that men are not leading their families and not in church and leading their families to the ecclesiastical gathering of brothers and sisters.

In fact, it's been left up to women. So now we have a whole church culture. And I would argue the evangelical church here in the States that I particularly don't agree with most of what they do anyway.

They have now made it their mission to preach, teach and write songs strictly for women, because that's who's in the congregation. That's who's tithing. That's who's bringing in other people. And it's very sad because just like Adam did in the garden, men in America have usurped their responsibility.

Adam was standing right next to Eve when she ate that apple. And that's why God said, Adam, where are you as the head of your house, as the man that protects the wife and the woman? Where were you when she made this decision?

Not only did you partake in it, but you left your husbandly and manly duty to protect your wife. And we have in the American church, and maybe it's the same way over in Australia, where I've seen men, especially within the church, kind of shirk back from their duties as leaders in their home.

And I think that's also helped feminize the church.

Biblical Manhood, Discipline, and Christ as the Model

What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I absolutely agree. The feminization of the church inverts God's patriarchal structure of the church. If you look at 1 Timothy 3, it outlines the guidelines for leadership, and it's modeled against the home.

The home needs to be in order, the father needs to be head of the home, and overseeing his children, his wife, and that's the model for church leadership. And when that's inverted, then the whole model for church leadership is inverted, and the entire structure just falls apart.

And women are on top, women are becoming even preachers. And at the best case scenario, the sermons and the songs are catered towards their emotional appeal.

Yeah. No, it's really sad too, because like you said, it inverts the order and the natural order that God created since Genesis 1. But shifting gears a little bit, so what do we do then? Well, first of all, let's ask this.

Maybe we should define for the listeners what biblical manhood is, and we've done it a little bit here in the first couple minutes, but biblical manhood is in general. What do we see when we're talking about biblical manhood?

Does that just mean I smoke cigars, drink scotch, and do Bible studies with my family? I mean, that's a great life, but is there more than that? Because sometimes, and I just talked to a gentleman down at the Fight Left Feast Conference, and the episode will be coming out, but he looked right at me and said, look, a lot of you guys, especially in the reform camp, want to walk around and say, I'm a man, I eat meat, I smoke my cigar, I drink my scotch, I do these things.

And he goes, but you can't even not put pizza rolls in your mouth at 11 o 'clock at night, snack at night, get up at seven o 'clock in the morning, run for three miles. You can't do the things that actually make you a man, discipline, self-control, watching what you put into your body.

Now he was an ex-army recon, so he had a little bit of a hard edge, but he was absolutely right. We like to sometimes, and I'll put the fault back on man, because I'm a big proponent of introspecting, right?

Let's look and see what I can do to change me. Let's not blame other people. I look at biblical manhood, and I see some of the foundational things that are biblical manhood we ignore, and then we just want to kind of show it in a superficial way.

I want to see men that are disciplined, men that are self-controlled, men that wash their wives in the word every day, men that are kind to their children and don't embitter them as the Bible say, yes, children obey your parents, but what's the very next command?

And fathers don't embitter your children, right? So some of these foundational things I'm not seeing. Would you agree that some of those things I just mentioned are kind of the foundation of biblical manhood, and would you add anything to that?

Absolutely. Even at a.

Physical level, like the physical discipline, I personally have cold showers every morning. I love it. And discipline your body. I like how Paul uses that example of of like fighting with your hands and how we discipline our body by beating it into submission because there's a integration between like physical discipline and spiritual discipline because you look at all the, like even the secular advice about waking up early, having cold showers and going to the gym, like you do that because the discipline it creates then seeps into all other areas of your life.

Yeah. So it makes sense for Christian men to use physical discipline to model their spiritual growth. So there's absolutely a connection that we we tend to overlook. And to answer your question about biblical manhood, I think the easiest model to follow is the model of Christ.

If you look at how Jesus lived, he didn't just walk around handing out daisies and helping grandmothers across the road. What he did, first of all, was he challenged the authorities and he fought for truth.

He wasn't afraid of ridicule. He also fought for the weak by reaching out and doing the unthinkable and actually touching lepers. Lepers were representations of sin and you certainly didn't touch them.

But he did that. He touched them. Jesus also worked hard. He had a job as a carpenter and I was just talking to my wife a couple of days ago about how insanely intense Christ's life was. For three years he devoted himself to this ministry and he had throngs of people reaching out to him wanting to get healed.

Most of them just wanted superficial healing. And he had to wake up early to be alone and he often had to run away almost in a boat to be alone. It's just such an intense, hard working life. And also real men growing God's word.

In Luke it says Jesus increased in wisdom in favor with God and men. Just Christ's life is a very simplified model of biblical manhood. Then you can expand it to the men of the Old Testament who are men just like us, but just devoted themselves to God's favor.

That's always good advice when we say,.

Let's model what men should be after Christ. He was obviously fully God and fully man, and that is a perfect example. So what do you think are some of the effects that we've seen in the last five to 10 years of a feminized church, both in the United States and the West and around the world?

What are some of those effects that we're seeing that we would say, well, if we had biblical men in this position or we were following the created order, we would see this differently. Do any things come to the top of your head?

I think the first thing that comes to the top of my head is we'd have men that can defend the Bible more fervently and with greater strength. Sadly, if you ask the average man, I think in church, how to defend the Trinity and how to even summarize the gospel, they're likely to have trouble.

They'll stumble and maybe lose their words, say a few buzzwords, but it was a commandment, it says in Peter, to give a response, be ready to give a response when you're challenged. I think apology church does a great job of showing the effects of that and how important that is.

Also, I think if the church was less feminized, the church would more boldly spread out into the darkness to defend the helpless and fight against abortion with greater fervor and other political issues.

Maybe we'd be more open to taking our kids out of school into homeschooling, doing actions like that, and just be more of a city on a hill, as Christ describes Christians. The image of being noticed amongst the darkness and being a reflection of.

Christ's light. What do you think the solution is? What's the solution of essentially established churches? Because when I'm thinking of these things, I'm thinking in terms of the country I live in, but I know, and we're going to get into this next, but I know in Australia, I think we're kind of on a similar path as Protestant churches go.

Pew did a research poll two years ago. They talked to 10 ,000 people who self-identify as evangelical. Between these two questions, do you believe the Trinity to be true? And do you believe Christ to be deity, to be God in between those two questions, 69 of people who self-identify as evangelical believers said no.

So that's the state we are in right now in the United States, where I have basically over two thirds, almost three quarters of self-professed Christians don't believe in orthodoxy and don't believe in orthodox Christianity.

I would suspect it's maybe the same higher, lower, similar there in Australia. So I think this is a universal problem. I don't think we're talking about, oh, well, over here in the United States, you need to do this.

And over here in Australia and over here in UK, we need to do that. I think we're seeing a universal, like we said, feminization, but also a moving away from the inherency of scripture, from biblical and exegetical preaching.

Taking Ownership of Sanctification and Strengthening the Church

What's our next steps? What do we need to do as a.

Teaching? You mentioned that you spoke to that ex-recon. I follow Jocko Willink, the ex-Navy SEAL, and he wrote a book called Extreme Ownership. And I think the first step is for real regenerate men to take ownership of their sanctification.

So hopefully by listening to this episode, they'll decide that if they need to work on themselves. So that might look like, you know, listening to podcasts like this, where you're encouraged to be a godly man.

It might look like investing in a Christian platform like Canon Press, just fantastic resources to learn about the Bible and to really ground your knowledge in your spare time rather than wasting your time gaming.

It could look like, you know, finding mentors and asking them to help you grow in the Bible. And that's all, all this effort is outside of church, because church is just a place, an extension of your life.

It's a place where you meet with others and strengthen them and celebrate Christ together. So all this effort needs to take place outside of church. And then I think once that happens, men will be emboldened to then start attending church and participating in church, and then even lovingly challenging leadership to maybe invert that feminist structure.

And yeah, I think it starts with men just realizing what the state.

They're in and taking ownership of themselves. Yeah. And I would like to point out here too, because when this episode releases and we put anything with the word feminism on it or women or anything to do with that, I inevitably I'm going to get comments and tweets and direct messages from Instagram with mostly women who have not read it or listened to it and just say, oh, your women hate ears, your women bashing, you hate women, right?

When in fact, what have we been talking about this whole episode when we're talking about the feminization of church? We're talking about what men can do. We're talking about men stepping up. Right. So even within a problem that seems to be like we said, a feminization of of of the universal church, we're talking about what men need to do and be responsible for.

So I would just like to point that out there, because if anyone who's a third wave feminist or or, you know, an LGBTQ supporter and you just think we're bashing women, if you've gotten this far into the episode, which I'm I'm thinking you haven't listened at all.

You just wanted to say something, you know, mean and and and cutting. Yeah. Please, please notice that we've been talking about men's responsibility here, because I believe as head of our homes, it ultimately falls on us.

But let's shift gears here a little bit. I don't get to talk to Aussies quite that often. So for our listeners who are mostly in the United States, we do have some in Eastern and Western Europe, and we a lot of good numbers there and appreciate all you guys listening across the world.

But tell give us a little update on what the kind of state of the churches are, kind of the state of your country, even after covid with those draconian lockdowns I was seeing over there. How's everything going in Australia from United States, brother to an.

Australian brother? Give us an update. It feels like the church is a bit apprehensive, like there are many churches that didn't want to do what John McArthur did, which is that peaceful process. So a lot of them kind of enforced mask mandates and many attendees weren't happy when when those mandates weren't enforced.

And from my experience and analysis, a lot of churches were apprehensive to challenge authorities. So they just kind of like closed down when they were asked to and enforced masks when they were asked to.

And yeah, Australia, I think in general, is feels more secular than the US. And Jeff Durbin and his crew, when they visited Sydney a few years ago, that's one of the first thing I noticed that it just feels like it's just more, there's more of a separation from Christ than there is in America, which is shocking.

I know, how could you be further separated than that? But yeah, now it's now it seems to have, like, I don't notice in South Australia, the lockdowns weren't as extreme as they were in Sydney, in New South Wales.

And things seem to have eased quite a lot.

Yeah, I did have a chuckle when I was first reading international news when this all went down. And I went, how are they going to lock down the outback? I mean, you guys are just like, you know what I mean?

It's like, yes, you have large cities, but you also just have miles and miles and miles of openness. Like the one place I would want to be with COVID would be the outer regions of rural Australia. Are you kidding me?

I got a lot of sun, a lot of fresh air, you know, and it was just it was just it just made me chuckle. Not that it was a funny thing that they were doing over there, but just going, this is the insane level that we've rose to.

We're going to we're going to lock down the last wild continent in the United States, you know, or I'm sorry, in the world. But let's let's shift here, OK? We're going to play a little game because, like I said, we don't have that many Australians on.

Well, actually, you might be the first. You might have that title. So I love it. We're going to play a little game. I'm going to give you three clips. It's called off. Is it authentic Australian? OK, and as our official one and only Australian guest, you need to tell me, is this authentic Australian?

This is first one is Jim Carrey's accent. Dumb and dumber. That's a lovely accent. You have New Jersey.

Austria, Austria. Well, good day, Mike. Let's put another shrimp on the ball.

OK, is that is that authentic or we throw them out as the imposter?

No, it's not good. Not good. All right. He's got another in an American accent.

All right. Now, this one is a little he was popular when I was growing up. This is Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee. Here we go. That's a knife. That's a knife. That's a knife. Now, just for full disclosure, that's what every American kid thought an Australian was in the 80s and early 90s.

So is that authentic? Australia is walking around with crocodile.

Teeth and leather boots on. In some areas, yes, absolutely.

So that could be authentic. All right. Here's the last one. One of my favorite Aussies. Here we go.

If there's one thing that I, Steve Irwin, would want to be remembered for, it's be remembered for passion and enthusiasm. Conservation is my job, my life, my whole.

Persona. All right. There we go. Steve Irwin, is he authentic Australian? Absolutely. Absolutely. Oh, one of my favorites. And I'm a big conservationist as well. So I always loved him. So here, as we wrap this up, can you throw out your social media links anywhere people can get in contact with you if you want them to and where they can find the Redeemed podcast?

The best place to get a listen is redeemedpodcast .org. And on Instagram, I'm just.

At redeemedpodcast. At redeemedpodcast. Guys, I encourage you go check out Ed's podcast, Redeemed podcast. It's so cool. I've already ran through just about all the episodes just in the week or so that it was brought to my attention.

I know we have a mutual friend, I believe in Dwayne Atkinson, which his name comes up over and over again, just because he is such a great brother in the Lord. Four episodes into this podcast, he reached out to me and goes, I don't know who you are.

I just heard you. I go, how'd you even find me? There's 12 people listening. He's like, hey, this is what I do. I make sure I find new podcasts. I encourage him. He brought me on the show, helped me along.

And, you know, every third guest I feel like I talk to, they know him in some way. And we have that mutual friend. And he did a really awesome episode with you as well, too. So, guys, if you want to hear more from Ed on a different subject, go check out Dwayne's podcast, The Bar Podcast, biblical and reformed, not black and reformed.

It could be that, too. We joked about that on our episode, but biblical and reformed. So give us some final.

Thoughts, Ed, as we head out here. My final thought is for all men out there to take ownership of their spirituality and to love their wives like Christ loves the church. Oh, man, that's good.

Guys, thanks so much for listening as usual. Ed, thanks for being on and taking time out of your day to be on. We'll make sure that we link up all of his sites and where you can find his content when this goes live.

We appreciate you guys listening, hanging in there with us, giving us feedback, commenting on the Facebook page, Instagram, and now Twitter for the last few months. I gave in. We're finally back on Twitter.

But we do appreciate it. As always, guys, God bless. Be sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Dead Men Walking Podcast for full video podcast episodes and clips or email us at deadmenwalkingpodcast at gmail .com.